Humans have a core desire to communicate and share with those around them—both nearby and around the globe—to enhance their individual, social and shared experiences. Since the beginning of recorded history, they have told stories to connect them with their past and with each other, and to improve their understanding and enjoyment of life. (In this Application, we use the term “stories” not only in the dictionary sense of ‘text-based narrative’ but also stories told via the visual arts, pictures, movies, music, messaging, social media, etc, and whether by voice, video, data or multi-media.)
Stories have or will become a metaphorical sixth sense, adding both a personal and a social sense to the traditional five personal senses (touch, sight, hearing, smell, taste).
Because stories bring people together—in person, as well as intellectually, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, and socially—and enhance understanding, humans have an implicit yearning to sense what others are thinking, or ‘get inside their thought bubble’. When meeting someone for the first time, or confronting an adversary or a new way of thinking, a typical human response is to the effect of “what's their story?” Humans want to be able to sense it, to understand it.
Social networking, social media and other recent interactive software applications and media (collectively herein, “social networks”) have provided their subscribers with new technologies to share their stories with their friends and certain third-parties, but are limited in two crucial respects: they require prior membership, subscription or enrollment; and, in order to execute communications with friends and certain third parties, social networks require use of both (a) a user's existing contact information, and (b) the social network's platform. Except for the art described and claimed in the Prior Patents, the prior art, up to and including sharing through social networks, is based on the premise that directed private communications are only possible or feasible between, among and to known fixed endpoints.
Typically, a phone number, address, or login information (“traditional identification information”) is needed to initiate a communication with a specific person. For example:    (1) to call a person, you dial a phone number;    (2) to text a person, you need their mobile phone number;    (3) to send an instant message, you need their email address, or a specific screen name or alias registered with the maker of an instant messaging application (e.g., Google Talk; AOL AIM);    (4) to email a person, you need an email address; and    (5) for web-based or mobile social networks, sites, or applications (jointly, “Social Medium”), you need to: (a) register with a specific Social Medium, providing either your email address or phone number; and (b) know or have access to a user's name or login information to communicate with them.However, there are many situations where this traditional identification information is not known, but individuals still wish to communicate with others whose traditional identification information they do not know.
Further, social networks and other Social Media are by their very nature self-limiting: s/he is either a member or one is not. If one is a member of a specific Social Medium, then s/he enjoys the benefits of that network. Non-members cannot receive the network's benefits. Our sixth-sense technology invention, by contrast, conceives a communications globe where everyone, every device and every server is connected, as part of a universal communications field—and is thus more akin to the earth's magnetic field and gravitational force, making continuous connections with others, as if sharing brain waves or even spiritual connections.
As a further distinction from the prior art, our sixth-sense technology gives users complete control of inbound and outbound communications, for everything from privacy and anonymity to depth and breadth of the content s/he shares. In this context, user communications are very personal, and infinitely variable. From this perspective, user communications are unstructured both in theory and in fact. By contrast, social networks impose a set of structured rules for member participation, and frequently dictate an inverse correlation between privacy and breadth of communication.
Our SST inventions overcome these limitations by enabling the sharing of stories, privately and anonymously, without reliance on or use of traditional contact information, third-party platforms, functionalities, or capabilities. All aspects of storing-telling—‘sensing’, discovery, searching, becoming aware, sharing, learning, sending, transmission and receiving functions—can all be performed as an inherent part of the communications process and communications operation, using the technologies of our invention embedded in their communications devices and/or in the associated enhanced communications network(s).
Our sixth-sense communications technology will enable users to search, send and receive voice, video and data between, among and to devices that are unknown to the sender or recipients (such devices herein “unknown devices”). Users will use the invention to sense what others want or are willing to share and learn, and thus share their stories and interests with others around them and around the globe. Our communications invention will power the discovery and delivery of all forms of global content and commerce.
Our invention and technology enable this new communications method, through:    (a) new processes to search, detect, discover, alert and sense unknown recipients and their unknown devices with attributes (i) lying within specified parameters, (ii) having common, variable or random characteristics, or (iii) determined by algorithm or otherwise,    (b) use new processes to enable a device user and others to direct a targeted message, voice, video, data or other communication to the unknown recipients on their unknown devices,    (c) through the combination of such processes in steps (a)-(b) above, to launch a new era of sixth-sense communications that enable people to “sense” and be alerted of others with whom they want or are willing to communicate and then act on that sense to share and learn their respective stories and interests, thus creating new ties that bond and bring people together, and    (d) through the combination of such processes in steps (a)-(c) above, to enable the discovery, alerting, and delivery of all forms (e.g., voice, video, data, multi-media) of global content and commerce among devices and people based on such sixth-sense communications capabilities (the methods and processes referred to in steps (a)-(d) above collectively herein, “Communications Methods”, and the Inventions covered hereby “Sixth-Sense Technology”, or simply “SST”).
People will thus use their communications devices embedded with our invention to “sense” and become aware of others—whether a new schoolmate, someone across town, or unknown individuals and groups halfway around the globe—with whom they want or are willing to communicate and then act on that sense to share and learn their respective stories and interests.
Our SST invention will thus bestow people with an artificial sixth sense—simply by using their communications devices—for them to search, sense, detect, be alerted, tell, and learn from the sharing of stories with others.
With the exception of what is contemplated by and/or foreseeable from the Related Inventions and the Prior Patents, we are not aware of anything in the prior art that heralds these new inventions and capabilities covered by this patent application.